


To Play the Picochet

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: A Song for the Basilisk - McKillip
Genre: Gen, Music, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Sirina waits, she discovers that a disdained instrument has its own story to tell her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Play the Picochet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/gifts).



> Notes to follow after the reveal. I hope there are not any egregious musical errors. Yuletide Treat.
> 
> EDITED: Hello! First, I want to apologize for not being able to run this by a beta. This was the last of six Yuletide stories I wrote, and I was running up against the deadline.
> 
> This story owes a lot to two things: my eight years on the viola (an instrument I still love), and a CD of Mongolian throat-singing I picked up during college. For the latter, the salient point is that it exposed me to the sound of the morin khuur, which I used as a loose basis for the sound of the picochet.
> 
> I am not a musician, but I have played and still play a few instruments (also soprano recorder and piano), and I compose as a hobby. My musical education ended with high school, but it gave me something to draw on for this story.

Hollis came to Sirina with ashes in his eyes, ashes falling out of his mouth. For a time, when she received him in her room in the duchess's alabaster and gold palace, she did not hear his words at all; heard only ashes with the last sparks damped from them.

"I can't not go," Hollis said, and the spell broke, although these words, too, were ashes, and could lead only to funeral pyres. "He needs me."

"Your father has always been capable of taking care of himself," Sirina replied, although she didn't believe it herself. "Berylon is no safe place for him. How can it be safe for you, who are his blood?"

"It's not about safety," he said, brows drawing down together.

"Then I should come with you," she said.

Hollis shook his head. "That would trouble him even more. Let me go for the both of us. I came only to tell you, so that you wouldn't worry."

"Wouldn't _worry_?" Sirina said incredulously. But he meant well, and in the end, she had to let him go. He spent the night at least, and accepted a small cold breakfast of rye bread, goat's cheese, and fruit preserves. As she watched him set out southward, she thought, with the wonder that comes to many a mother, that the boy she had raised had altogether too much of his father's bearing.

In the days that followed, Sirina played smoke-like trills where there should have been appoggiaturas, struck accidentals from her scales like sparks, had trouble holding a constant tempo. Although the duchess who had engaged her services was not greatly musical, even she noticed the erratic quality of Sirina's work. Fortunately, the duchess was also gentle of temperament.

"My dear," she said with her accustomed familiarity, although she was in fact a decade younger than Sirina, "what is it that troubles you?" Like many in this part of the north, she was almost as fair as the snow. The rich colors she wore, saffron embroidered with silver threads curling into snowbirds in flight and sewn with faceted jet beads, made Sirina think uncomfortably of fire, of smoke, of cinders.

"A wind out of the south, m'lady," Sirina said, oblique not out of a desire to dissemble, but to protect. "A dream of a ruined city. Ashes."

"Your son."

Although the duchess ruled with a light hand, there were no secrets from her in this court. "Yes," Sirina said, wondering if Hollis would have done better to send her a message rolled up in a transcribed tavern song rather than bearing it personally.

"Your music," the duchess said after a thoughtful pause, "takes strange new shapes. Sometimes I think I hear the cries of ravens, and sometimes I think I hear human voices in the lavandre's notes. You should take your time and explore these shapes, play me something entirely new."

Taking Sirina's bemused silence as acquiescence, she swept away then, to talk to a fox-faced courtier about the distribution of grain, something entirely separate from the world of music. Except nothing, as Sirina had learned at Luly, was entirely separate from music.

It took Sirina another week before she found what she was looking for. In that time, she tormented her listeners with half-formed scales on the lute based in quarter-tones, ragged syncopation on drums carved with the grinning heads of tigers, and shrieking overtones on the lavandre, as though she were trying to communicate to the spirits of every bird roasted for dinner in the north. She tried to smother the fire in her dreams with low, soothing lullabies and wailing threnodies. None of it worked.

Then she remembered the picochet.

The duchess did not have any picochets, but there was, so it happened, a farmer's widow who had one and was more than happy to sell it to the court bard. Her hands lingered on the worn wood, whose scratches told illegible stories of careless toddlers and cats and perhaps the occasional brawl. "He played it so beautifully," the widow said. "The picochet. Not as beautiful as a bard, I reckon."

Sirina said carefully, "I will do my best to be worthy of it." She was having doubts, remembering what she did of the picochet's galloping melodies and whickering tones. She wondered if the duchess was going to regret asking her to experiment.

The widow smiled at her, reading nothing in her tone but a bard's proper formality. "Of course you will. Play it well. Perhaps m'lady's court will bloom."

Sirina, thinking of the courtiers' florid finery, all silk and velvet, ruffles and lace, said, "I don't think that will be a problem."

Sirina's first experiments with the picochet, in her apartment at court with all the door firmly shut, were only a success if you counted the production of sound a success. But then, she could have achieved as much by rapping on the picochet's back with her knuckles. She was sure it was a legitimate picochet technique.

The bowing was not so different from that of a viol, although she had to adjust to the single string's looser tension. Her left hand, spidering up and down to play the simplest of scales, kept expecting another string to jump to, and found none. She experimented with spiccato, staccato, col legno. All the techniques she had learned on the viol, she brought to bear. The instrument responded. But it refused to sing.

The duchess caught her in the kitchen, coaxing a very late dinner out of the sleepy cook. "M'lady," Sirina said, managing a very creditable curtsey despite the bowl of soup in one hand. A drop of soup spilled onto the floor. They both ignored it.

"How are your experiments going?" the duchess asked.

"I am familiarizing myself with the picochet's musical properties," Sirina said. She did not add that there might well be none.

The duchess only raised an eyebrow and said, "You should eat while that's warm."

"Yes, m'lady," Sirina said, but the duchess had already passed out of the kitchen.

Foiled in one approach, Sirina tried another. She abandoned everything she knew, all the formal techniques that, when applied to the viol, resulted in such ribbony beauty. Generations of farmers have mastered this instrument and brought up the crops, Sirina reasoned. Why can't I?

Eyes half-closed, dreaming of salted cities and desiccated corpses, Sirina asked the picochet to play her the end of the story. It rewarded her with the raven's caw, the screams of burning horses, the clicking of the basilisk's claws across marble floors. It was not beautiful music. But it was a song, and it was true.

The next time the duchess encountered her, Sirina said, "I'm not certain you want to hear the music I've persuaded the picochet to play for me, m'lady." She began to describe the sounds.

The duchess held up a hand. "There's no need," she said. "The song is for you, not for me." In her eyes the city's name burned: _Berylon._ She knew. Even in this far northern court, she knew.

Sirina curtseyed. "Thank you," she said.

"He'll come back to you," the duchess predicted.

Head bowed, Sirina returned to the picochet, to play another song for Hollis and Caladrius.


End file.
